Christian Holze: The Art of Copying the Copy

Christian Holze’s work (b. 1988, Germany) exists in a space where painting, sculpture, and digital media merge into one another. Represented by Reiter Gallery, he presents Nothing New (2024) at Art Rotterdam’s Sculpture Park, a sculptural intervention that digs into the mechanics of copying, ownership, and authenticity, questioning what it really means to “own” an image or an artwork.

Christian is interested in the spaces between things, between art and commerce, between original and copy, between the seen and the unseen.

Appropriating the Appropriators
Christian systematically collects images from luxury brand campaigns. Gucci draping models in a room full of Roman statues? Louis Vuitton staging a campaign in the Louvre? He saves them, studies them, and then feeds them back into his own work, effectively reversing the cycle. "Companies use art to ennoble their products, making them appear more valuable. I reverse this process by bringing corporate visuals back into an artistic context.”

This extends beyond imagery. His previous exhibition Souvenir from Rome borrows its title from a Gucci campaign, mirroring how brands co-opt cultural heritage. "The advertising becomes a painting again. The product becomes an artwork again. I like that shift."

The Illusion of Ownership
Holze exposes a contradiction in visual culture: an image watermark signals restriction until you pay to remove it, while a luxury brand logo increases desirability. One marks something as incomplete, the other as exclusive. "When you have the bag, the logo makes it more valuable. But with Getty Images, you just want the watermark gone even though the artwork was never theirs to begin with."

Christian translates this tension into his own work. His paintings feature a faint, almost imperceptible pattern, his own “watermark.” It’s a subtle but deliberate gesture: a reminder that even in art, ownership is never as simple as it seems.

Provenance as a Living Process
Christian’s fascination with how artworks move through history is embedded in his practice. He studies pieces that have been endlessly copied and reinterpreted, like the Borghese Gladiator, one of the most duplicated sculptures in art history. "I wanted to go as far back as I could while staying within the ‘cliché’ of art history. The Borghese Gladiator became my starting point, it had already been copied and reshaped for centuries."

This recursive chain continues with Bernini’s David, which was inspired by the same Gladiator. Christian taps into this long lineage of appropriation, questioning at what point an artwork stops being a copy and becomes something new.

Merging, Morphing, Multiplying
Christian Holze’s installation at Art Rotterdam is a living archive where historical references, digital manipulation, and material transformation converge. Set within a modular aluminum structure reminiscent of museum storage racks, his works actively expose the fluid nature of art history. "Seeing the back of an artwork often tells you as much as the front. It’s about history, context, and the journey of an object."

At the core of the installation is a 3D-fused sculpture of two versions of Dionysus, one attributed to Michelangelo, the other by an unknown artist. By merging them into a single entity, Christian forces the copy to encounter itself, dissolving the boundaries between original and reproduction. "The copy is confronted with its own copy. They blend into each other, and suddenly, authorship becomes unclear."

Another work draws from Jens Adolf Jerichau’s 19th-century sculpture Panther Hunter, a piece that mimics the idealised forms of Greek antiquity. Holze worked with an existing 3D model of the sculpture, compressing and reshaping it into a painting, reversing the usual process of sculptural replication. Even its title shifts: "I flipped the title, it’s now Hunter Panther. A small shift, but enough to create a new context."

The final piece stems from Holze’s series The Most Boring Artist I Know, a nod to Cy Twombly’s obsession with Raphael’s School of Athens. After years of reinterpreting the fresco, Twombly ultimately dismissed Raphael as “boring.” Holze, however, sees something else. "I liked that, the idea that boredom can only come from deep engagement. It’s not ignorance, it’s the exhaustion of fascination."

These works do not stand in isolation. They interlock like fragments of a shifting timeline, questioning how meaning is shaped through repetition, reinterpretation, and the constant movement of images across centuries.

The Work That Reflects Its Space
Even the rooms his works are created in play a role in their final form. Christian stages his sculptures in digital 3D spaces before translating them into the physical world. The catch? The rooms themselves disappear, only their reflections remain on the sculptures.

"The surrounding space creates the image. The reflections on the surface capture the environment, but once printed, the room itself disappears, only its echoes remain."

This is a perfect metaphor for his entire practice. His work doesn’t provide fixed answers. Instead, it holds up a mirror to the systems we take for granted and lets us reconsider what we think we know. At Art Rotterdam, that mirror is right in front of us.

Written by Emily Van Driessen